The only problem with IE's support of these issues is that it is all or nothing. If you want to have different settings for different domains, you must assign all sites to a particular category (Restricted, Trusted, Internet, etc.) and then all sites in that category have the same rule. There is no flexibility to selectively choose which domains apply which rules. For example, I can't set IE to block scripts for a site belonging to my Trusted category without blocking scripts for all my Trusted sites.
One solution MS could probably do is to allow the user to add more categories of his/her own choosing, but seeing as how not many people actually take advantage of these categories anyway it is a rather weak solution.
If you really have the time, run throught the CSS1 tests at W3C CSS Level 1 Test Suite.
You can then see that IE does NOT in fact support the standards as well as Microsoft would claim they do. Mozilla performs nearly flawlessly on this test with under 5 rendering errors. IE 5.5, on the other hand, had more than 40 rendering errors.
The real problem here is that for each link where the user wanted more information, Microsoft could have a link inserted to provide more information on Microsoft products.
If you were a Ford car saleman, would you want Chevy salesman coming onto your car lot while you were trying to make a sale coaxing people to come look at their cars. No! Likely you'd have them shot or at least physically removed for tresspassing.
I consider this to be similar to illegal bait-n-switch tactics. If I went to a store to buy brand X, I would expect to buy brand X not brand Y.
While Mozilla isn't perfect, it is leaps & bounds farther W3C compliant than IE. I haven't used it, but I hear Opera is more compliant also.
I personally ran Mozilla 9.1 & IE 5.5 through the W3C CSS1 tests a few weeks back. Mozilla had just a few errors. However, I stopped counting after IE exceeded 40.
This seems to be just another way in which Microsoft is trying to fragment & otherwise "extend" standards to suit there own purposes. I wish M$ would just get with the program & make IE a 100% W3C standard compliant browser.
I thought one of the purposes of the W3C's XLink standard was to do similar informational links. The difference being who has control over what additional content is added to the website. The website owner or Microsoft.
I certainly don't like the idea of Microsoft controling or changing any content associated with my website.
Also, since this apparently only works with Windows XP and Office XP, it tries to perpetuate (in typical Microsoft fashion) usage of their products over any others.
I used to have an Amiga 500. As hopeful as I can be in an Amiga comeback, the thing I remember most is that it was the hardware technology that made the Amiga as good as it was. Sure, AmigaOS was/is more stable than Windows, but the core competency of the Amiga has to be the dedicated graphics, sound, and I/O chips built-in. The way they interoperated made the Amiga basically a parallel processing computer ahead of its time.
When I hear news of AmigaOS running on a x86 machine, I just am naturally skeptical. The speed of todays processors just can't make up for all of the architechural limitations of the standard PC.
Fortunately, most of us who live in the US usually have ISPs which we pay per month for UNLIMITED access. The biggest price to us will be the time it takes to have to wait through these interrupting ads.
But what about some other countries -- the UK comes to mind -- which have pay per minute connections? How do you think these people will feel having to pay to be forced to watch these "commercials" while trying to surf the web.
>I have been a/. reader for while now and I have to say -- I have thought about stopping.
What? Do you think that to stop reading/. that problems with the DMCA will somehow miraculously go away? The only thing that will happen then is that you will be as ignorant as the mindless uninformed masses.
At least with the knowledge of events on Slashdot, you can speak out & share the information with the non-Slashdot crowd. Then maybe our voice can be loud enough to be heard over the $$$s of the Congressional lobbists.
Spread the word!
I think you are missing the point that distribution sales are made because there is a demand for them, whether they are retail or OEM.
The only way either retail or OEM sales will take off is if there becomes a real demand from Joe Shmoe user. Until the distros become more standardized in ease-of-use/install, average people (e.g., grandma, baby brother, corporations, etc.) will not buy-in to Linux to make it mainstream.
I realized that some technogeeks want the million & one options to configure in their Linux distrobution. There is nothing wrong with that.
There is nothing wrong with having a default easy install.
Those of us who would-be ubergeeks such as myself would rather have a default install to start with the first time that we install.
I like to start with some easy options already installed. Then after I get used to finding my way around Linux, I will dig into kernel hacking, configurations, etc.
It makes things so much easier if I can learn with small easy-to-swallow nibbles into the different options in Linux rather than have the whole enchilada rammed down my throat at the outset.
About a month ago, I decided to take the plunge & get Linux. At the time before I installed, I could care less what XFree86, get-apt, chmod, chown, make, etc. was. I just wanted to get it up and running.
For some people, that is a far as they would wish to go. Get it up & running, then use the apps -- Gimp, KWord, games, what have you.
Others who are more technically minded can look into all the details to see how everything fits together AFTER it is running. These are the people who can customized to their hearts content.
I don't understand why we can't have it both ways. We certainly don't want to take away all the configurability in Linux -- it happens to be a strong selling point for it. However, we shouldn't force every Joe Shmoe new user to have to learn every nuance of the operating system in order for it to be usable.
Actually, Windows does catch a lot of crashes that happen in the background & hides them from the user.
For example, ever wonder why all the icons on the desktop & taskbar redraw from time to time? Or why your icons display the wrong pictures for an app? These are both the result of a crash in Windows where it recovers & restarts again.
Most Windows users don't really recognize how much havoc is going on behind the scenes.
Unfortunately, the fact that Windows does catch a lot of things is a mixed blessing. It is good that a small error can easily be caught before you lose that important work. It is bad because it doesn't put enough pressure on Microsoft to fix these problems in new versions of Windows.
The thing I worry about is that since Linux operates much differently than Windows it will give a perception to potential Linux converts that Linux is less stable.
Anyways, since we are talking about it. I don't particular care for CSI. Don't we already have enough TV shows about cops as it is? Let's see (counting shows I still see reruns on TV about):
New York Undercover
NYPD Blue
Big Apple
CSI
COPS
America's Most Wanted
America's Dummest Criminals
LAPD
Law & Order
Law & Order: SVU
Nash Bridges
The District
Walker, Texas Ranger
I am sure I've missed a few. Then there are some that can be sort of included like X-Files which has police elements.
Not to say there is anything wrong with cop shows -- I do have my favorites that I enjoy watching. (I still like to catch reruns of Hawaii Five-O.)
I am a bit annoyed that UPN put Level 9 & Freedom on hiatus. The mind-numbing Celebrity Deathmatch and Gary & Mike (which I like) had to take the time slots assigned to them.
One of the complaints I hear is that Mozilla has taken 3 years to develop into its current state & it's still not stable enough for my [insert favorite relative here: e.g., dad, mom, baby brother, cousin, etc.] to use daily.
The thing that frustrates me with this argument is that due to the openness of Mozilla everyone knows when development actually started on it. Then the uninformed complain that IE took less time to develop.
There seems to be two obvious things overlooked:
1) IE 5 was built upon the existing IE 4.x code. It wasn't virtually rebuilt completely from scratch as Mozilla has. The last number I heard is that there is less than 5% legacy 4.x code left in Mozilla.
2) We know when they actually started to build Mozilla. Who knows how long Microsoft kept IE under wraps programming & debugging it before they publicly announced it? For all we know, they could have started programming it back in 834BC on an abacus -- which might explain a few things.
The fact that Open Source projects are just that -- open for all to see ( & critique ) doesn't necessarily mean that they take longer to produce.
Slashdot Mirror
The only problem with IE's support of these issues is that it is all or nothing. If you want to have different settings for different domains, you must assign all sites to a particular category (Restricted, Trusted, Internet, etc.) and then all sites in that category have the same rule. There is no flexibility to selectively choose which domains apply which rules. For example, I can't set IE to block scripts for a site belonging to my Trusted category without blocking scripts for all my Trusted sites.
One solution MS could probably do is to allow the user to add more categories of his/her own choosing, but seeing as how not many people actually take advantage of these categories anyway it is a rather weak solution.
If you really have the time, run throught the CSS1 tests at W3C CSS Level 1 Test Suite. You can then see that IE does NOT in fact support the standards as well as Microsoft would claim they do. Mozilla performs nearly flawlessly on this test with under 5 rendering errors. IE 5.5, on the other hand, had more than 40 rendering errors.
The real problem here is that for each link where the user wanted more information, Microsoft could have a link inserted to provide more information on Microsoft products.
If you were a Ford car saleman, would you want Chevy salesman coming onto your car lot while you were trying to make a sale coaxing people to come look at their cars. No! Likely you'd have them shot or at least physically removed for tresspassing.
I consider this to be similar to illegal bait-n-switch tactics. If I went to a store to buy brand X, I would expect to buy brand X not brand Y.
While Mozilla isn't perfect, it is leaps & bounds farther W3C compliant than IE. I haven't used it, but I hear Opera is more compliant also.
I personally ran Mozilla 9.1 & IE 5.5 through the W3C CSS1 tests a few weeks back. Mozilla had just a few errors. However, I stopped counting after IE exceeded 40.
This seems to be just another way in which Microsoft is trying to fragment & otherwise "extend" standards to suit there own purposes. I wish M$ would just get with the program & make IE a 100% W3C standard compliant browser.
I thought one of the purposes of the W3C's XLink standard was to do similar informational links. The difference being who has control over what additional content is added to the website. The website owner or Microsoft.
I certainly don't like the idea of Microsoft controling or changing any content associated with my website.
Also, since this apparently only works with Windows XP and Office XP, it tries to perpetuate (in typical Microsoft fashion) usage of their products over any others.
I used to have an Amiga 500. As hopeful as I can be in an Amiga comeback, the thing I remember most is that it was the hardware technology that made the Amiga as good as it was. Sure, AmigaOS was/is more stable than Windows, but the core competency of the Amiga has to be the dedicated graphics, sound, and I/O chips built-in. The way they interoperated made the Amiga basically a parallel processing computer ahead of its time.
When I hear news of AmigaOS running on a x86 machine, I just am naturally skeptical. The speed of todays processors just can't make up for all of the architechural limitations of the standard PC.
Fortunately, most of us who live in the US usually have ISPs which we pay per month for UNLIMITED access. The biggest price to us will be the time it takes to have to wait through these interrupting ads.
But what about some other countries -- the UK comes to mind -- which have pay per minute connections? How do you think these people will feel having to pay to be forced to watch these "commercials" while trying to surf the web.
>I have been a /. reader for while now and I have to say -- I have thought about stopping.
What? Do you think that to stop reading /. that problems with the DMCA will somehow miraculously go away? The only thing that will happen then is that you will be as ignorant as the mindless uninformed masses.
At least with the knowledge of events on Slashdot, you can speak out & share the information with the non-Slashdot crowd. Then maybe our voice can be loud enough to be heard over the $$$s of the Congressional lobbists.
Spread the word!
I think you are missing the point that distribution sales are made because there is a demand for them, whether they are retail or OEM.
The only way either retail or OEM sales will take off is if there becomes a real demand from Joe Shmoe user. Until the distros become more standardized in ease-of-use/install, average people (e.g., grandma, baby brother, corporations, etc.) will not buy-in to Linux to make it mainstream.
I realized that some technogeeks want the million & one options to configure in their Linux distrobution. There is nothing wrong with that.
There is nothing wrong with having a default easy install.
Those of us who would-be ubergeeks such as myself would rather have a default install to start with the first time that we install.
I like to start with some easy options already installed. Then after I get used to finding my way around Linux, I will dig into kernel hacking, configurations, etc.
It makes things so much easier if I can learn with small easy-to-swallow nibbles into the different options in Linux rather than have the whole enchilada rammed down my throat at the outset.
About a month ago, I decided to take the plunge & get Linux. At the time before I installed, I could care less what XFree86, get-apt, chmod, chown, make, etc. was. I just wanted to get it up and running.
For some people, that is a far as they would wish to go. Get it up & running, then use the apps -- Gimp, KWord, games, what have you.
Others who are more technically minded can look into all the details to see how everything fits together AFTER it is running. These are the people who can customized to their hearts content.
I don't understand why we can't have it both ways. We certainly don't want to take away all the configurability in Linux -- it happens to be a strong selling point for it. However, we shouldn't force every Joe Shmoe new user to have to learn every nuance of the operating system in order for it to be usable.
Actually, Windows does catch a lot of crashes that happen in the background & hides them from the user.
For example, ever wonder why all the icons on the desktop & taskbar redraw from time to time? Or why your icons display the wrong pictures for an app? These are both the result of a crash in Windows where it recovers & restarts again.
Most Windows users don't really recognize how much havoc is going on behind the scenes.
Unfortunately, the fact that Windows does catch a lot of things is a mixed blessing. It is good that a small error can easily be caught before you lose that important work. It is bad because it doesn't put enough pressure on Microsoft to fix these problems in new versions of Windows.
The thing I worry about is that since Linux operates much differently than Windows it will give a perception to potential Linux converts that Linux is less stable.
Why did this even make it into Slashdot?
Anyways, since we are talking about it. I don't particular care for CSI. Don't we already have enough TV shows about cops as it is? Let's see (counting shows I still see reruns on TV about):
New York Undercover
NYPD Blue
Big Apple
CSI
COPS
America's Most Wanted
America's Dummest Criminals
LAPD
Law & Order
Law & Order: SVU
Nash Bridges
The District
Walker, Texas Ranger
I am sure I've missed a few. Then there are some that can be sort of included like X-Files which has police elements.
Not to say there is anything wrong with cop shows -- I do have my favorites that I enjoy watching. (I still like to catch reruns of Hawaii Five-O.)
I am a bit annoyed that UPN put Level 9 & Freedom on hiatus. The mind-numbing Celebrity Deathmatch and Gary & Mike (which I like) had to take the time slots assigned to them.
But do we really need another cop show?
Geez, give us a break!
One of the complaints I hear is that Mozilla has taken 3 years to develop into its current state & it's still not stable enough for my [insert favorite relative here: e.g., dad, mom, baby brother, cousin, etc.] to use daily.
The thing that frustrates me with this argument is that due to the openness of Mozilla everyone knows when development actually started on it. Then the uninformed complain that IE took less time to develop.
There seems to be two obvious things overlooked:
1) IE 5 was built upon the existing IE 4.x code. It wasn't virtually rebuilt completely from scratch as Mozilla has. The last number I heard is that there is less than 5% legacy 4.x code left in Mozilla.
2) We know when they actually started to build Mozilla. Who knows how long Microsoft kept IE under wraps programming & debugging it before they publicly announced it? For all we know, they could have started programming it back in 834BC on an abacus -- which might explain a few things.
The fact that Open Source projects are just that -- open for all to see ( & critique ) doesn't necessarily mean that they take longer to produce.
> I remember that demo that fitted on a floppy disk.. what happened?
That "demo" that fitted on a floppy is still there. It is called Gecko. It is simply the rendering engine inside Mozilla.
Rob
Don't forget the awe-inspiring informative wonder -- the Blue Screen of Death. What would we do without them?
At least it is more easy on the eyes than the red one on my old Amiga 500.
Rob